The Top Ten Most Successful “Missing” Number Ones Artists – Number 9: Dan Fogelberg

On July 12th, 1979, a game between the Chicago White Sox and Detroit Tigers at Comiskey Park was suspended and later forfeited to the visiting team.

Because of a poorly conceptualized promotion called Disco Demolition.  

That week on the Billboard charts, disco dominated.

• Anita Ward’s “Ring My Bell” sat at #1; Donna Summer took up the next two spots.
• Six of the top 10 were disco songs, including one-hit wonder and part-time werewolf David Naughton with his über-disco hit “Makin’ It” (it’s a 3).
• Singer-songwriter Ricki Lee Jones topped the non-disco songs with “Chuck E’s in Love” at #4 (it’s a 6.)

But the pop world was dominated by disco.  

The response to that eventful night was a backlash to disco that Stereogum reviewer Tom Breihan does a great job explaining here, but essentially disco had peaked. It took a few years to sort out what would be the next “big” thing in pop music.

But in the vacuum that followed disco’s decline, a wide variety of music appeared in the Top 20: medleys, disco, country, rock, nostalgic doo-wop, and soft rock among others.

And Dan Fogelberg had the biggest hit of his career.

Fogelberg was born in 1951 in Peoria, Illinois to a classically trained pianist and a high school band director. He taught himself how to play slide guitar and piano, and in high school he started a Beatles cover band.

Azoff sent him to Nashville to work on his skills, where he recorded his first album, Home Free. 

Joe Walsh was the producer, while Don Henley, Glenn Frey, and Graham Nash played on some tracks. “Part of the Plan”, Fogelberg’s second single from the album, hit the Top 40, and he was on his way to success. 

Instead, Joe Walsh joined the Eagles for On the Border, while Fogelberg found his niche: a solid songwriter who sold albums in the United States and Canada, but rarely impressed the pop market

…at least, until after Disco Demolition Night.

The first single failed. “Face The Fire”, written in response to the Three Mile Island nuclear near-disaster that summer – and NOT burning vinyl at Disco Demolition – was released in November, and went nowhere.

Disco was still strong: Barbra Streisand and Donna Summer’s disco ballad “Enough is Enough” was #1 – (Tom gave it an 8), but changes were on the horizon, as “My Sharona” (8) and “Pop Muzik” (9) had already topped the charts.

“Longer” was released on December 8, and it began a slow climb:

There’s no percussion in “Longer”, nothing to give it a backbone…and that’s a problem. The acoustic guitar and harp intertwine throughout the song, with only a chord slide at :09 and a few times later to make it interesting.

Otherwise, it’s the audio version of overcooked pasta, and the lyrics are worse. Fish have been on Earth for over half a billion years – is the narrator immortal? What about the subject? Oops, sorry…longer than the stars up in the heavens, so we’ve bumped it up to over 14 billion years. This guy witnessed the Big Bang.

Dan even acknowledged the limpness of the song, saying “Longer” was the song “that put him on the elevators”, Muzak style.

There are more sincere ways to offer how hopelessly one is in love…for instance, The National’s “Slow Show” Aaron Dessner wrote: “You know I dreamed about you, I missed you for twenty-nine years”…it just comes across more heartfelt, even if they were recycled lyrics from the song “29 Years” on their first album.

Even the solo in the bridge is lukewarm, a casual flugelhorn before Fogelberg recycles his own lyrics. 

What’s so frustrating about “Longer” is that Fogelberg did so much better elsewhere.

His next album The Innocent Age had 3 Top 10 hits, and two of them were lyrical masterpieces. Released just in time for the 1980 holiday season, “Same Old Lang Syne” was an autobiographical song about running into a lost love, a story confirmed after Fogelberg’s death by the subject of the song.

It hit #9, and to this day remains one of my favorite Christmastime songs around, and in the right moment, I’ll even shed a tear.

It’s a 10, obviously.

The third single, “Leader of the Band” was an ode to his band-directing father, a gorgeous tribute written just a year before his dad’s death (it’s a 9), and it hit #9.

Fogelberg was an extremely good storyteller, and the pop world finally recognized it.

Three top 10 hits (plus “Run for the Roses” which hit #18), and Fogelberg had become a pop chart juggernaut.

Other soft-rock artists also enjoyed their moment in the sun as well…

• Rupert Holmes
• Rocky Burnette
• Bertie Higgins
• Marty Balin

All of whom enjoyed Top 10 success in the wake of disco’s fall.

On August 1, 1981 MTV was launched. At first the channel only reached a few homes in New Jersey (and had a very limited selection of music videos), but quickly grew influential with its British New Wave videos and younger demographics. The short-lived singer-songwriter soft rock sway over the Top 100 was over. 

Fogelberg’s decline from pop stardom was gentle – he put out five albums over the next decade, and even hit the Top 20 in 1984 with “The Language of Love,” which doesn’t even have its own Wikipedia page.

He played all the instruments on Full Circle, his last release before his death, but you wouldn’t know it reading the credits:

A year later, Fogelberg was diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer, and after chemotherapy and a brief remission, he passed away in 2007.

I wish one of his other hits peaked higher than “Longer”, but if one had, Tom would’ve rated it.

GRADE: 4/10

TRIVIA: Supertramp was mentioned TWICE in Tom’s “The Number Ones” column (“Logical Song” is a 6); in the Gilbert O’Sullivan’s “Alone Again (Naturally)” for obvious reasons, since O’Sullivan and Rick Davies once played in a band together, but they’re mentioned a second time under which R&B singer’s #1 hit?

Last week Wayne Newton was the subject, mentioned once in Tom’s column under Celine Dion and R. Kelly’s “I’m Your Angel”, when Tom brought up Dion’s Vegas residencies.  

BONUS BEATS: I’m a big fan of Daft Punk, and they sampled Fogelberg and Weisberg’s “Tell Me to My Face” in their “Face to Face”, their fifth single off the perfect album Discovery:

(Daft Punk’s highest-charting single is the the 2013 Pharrell collab “Get Lucky,” which peaked at #2. It’s an 8. As guests – Daft Punk will eventually appear in Tom’s column.)

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